Oh my, might STX have made a dirty cop thriller?
Not Chadwick Boseman. He’s the detective sent to figure out why eight police officers died in a drug raid, and kill or catch — in that order — the people responsible.
What will he discover as he closes Manhattan’s “21 Bridges,” shuts down subways and ferries, swamping the island with a “flood of blue” in this manhunt?
Sienna Miller, Keith David and J.K. Simmons also star in “21 Bridges,” which opens July 21.
Matthew Glave and Emily Bett (different billing on the poster and IMDb, “Emily Bett Rickards”) are the stars of this May 24 release (VOD, limited theatrical), which may explain why Blue Fox has it and it’s going to those platforms rather than full court press theatrical.
“Funny Story” looks cute, if kind of predictable. Made it into a lot of festivals, won some awards — Santorini, Santa Cruz, Southhampton.
And the five star reviews are all over it…from “The Movie Waffler” and her/his ilk.
But again, looks cute. So maybe.
Variety (@Variety) Tweeted:
#AvengersEndgame slaughtered records with a $1.2 billion global debut https://t.co/22IjCAri6F https://t.co/0NnGfP0AF0 https://twitter.com/Variety/status/1122818056680394752?s=17
Simon Pegg & Nick Frost’s Stolen pop Picture To Adapt Ben Aaronovitch’s Epic Fantasy Drama ‘Rivers of London’, report via Deadline.com. https://t.co/GglHJqBTpj https://t.co/Th91c8gKgk https://twitter.com/DEADLINE/status/1122817818947244032?s=17
A six year-old boy comes home, drops his books, fetches a glass of milk and a drawing he did and calls for his mother. He finds her, in bed, empty bottles of pills littering the night stand.
He puts down the milk, pulls the covers up to her chin and kisses her. “Goodbye, Mom.”
The boy has to endure his father’s furious erasure of her from their lives, burning mementos, photos, the works. “She was NEVER here…She did this to US. Understand me?”
“Just Say Goodbye” begins with those gripping moments, and proceeds to squander them in a lukewarm melodrama about Jesse (Max MacKenzie) ten years later, bullied, guilt-ridden and miserable, with only one friend, our narrator Sarah (Katerina Eichenberger).
Screenwriter Layla O’Shea, director Mark Watling and star MacKenzie make this kid so passive that it takes a while for empathy to build up enough before Jesse hits his one friend, his great defender Sarah with his Big Reveal.
“I can’t wait till I’m gone.” He’s talking about college, right? Wait, he’s just 16. What he’s really talking about is taking Mom’s way out. He’s killing himself.
The rest of the movie is Sarah trying to talk him out of it and Jesse feigning glibness at his big plans.
“You’re 16. You make it sound like life’s over with already.”
“Isn’t it?”
Jesse insists that every shirt he buys has a pocket because he’s saved one photograph of his mother from his dad’s (William Galatis) Mom-Purge. That’s a nice detail in a movie that could use a lot more of those to go with the kid growing up to be an aspiring artist, the standard-issue (and way too old for high school) bully (Jesse Walters) and the bottles Dad crawled into after Mom killed herself.
The dialogue is stilted, and in general the movie could use a few more hints that these teens are real teenagers — in their preoccupations, their hormones, their speech.
Jesse just takes every injury and insult the bullying Chase dishes out, leaving it to Sarah to ineffectually stick up for him, even when the non-swimmer is dragged into the lake where he might well die.
“You were letting yourself drown!”
“We’ve all got to go sometime.”
The performances are generally tepid, with Eichenberger not capable of ginning up sympathy for MacKenzie’s Jesse by herself. His motives seems more questionable than your average big screen suicide and MacKenzie’s performance is more morose than empathetic.
There’s tension in the finale, but everything that comes between that gripping opening and that climax has a seen-this-before/I-know-what’s-coming quality.
It’s topical and never terrible. But “Just Say Goodbye” plays as if a word was left out of end of the title — “Already.”
MPAA Rating: unrated, with violence, suicide, alcohol abuse and profanity
Cast: Max MacKenzie, Katerina Eichenberger, Pamela Jayne Morgan, Jesse Walters, William Galatis
Credits:Directed by Matt Walting, script by Layla O’Shea. A Leomark Studios release.
Running time: 1:46
The only photographers to ever merit documentaries being made about them are the ones who photograph New York.
So if you’re in say, Cheraw, S.C. (a vivid, colorful, poor and forgotten town I pass through on the way to visit relatives) and you want to get famous, you have to go take pictures of what generations of shooters have photographed — the changing panorama of NYC.
That’s where Martha Cooper made her name. She left photogenic Baltimore for New York’s grime and glamour.
“A Picture Story” just premiered at Tribeca.
Earlier this week, pre release, AMC said four theaters in the chain would stay open all through the night this weekend, based on presale demand. Now that’s up to 17. From the LATimes
https://t.co/jlLao6wqy0 https://twitter.com/latimes/status/1122410119671820288?s=17
Wow. A three hour long comic book movie is baron of the box office.
Still not that enthused about this. The director is key. Hard to replace the leads. Impossible to replace Barry Sonnenfeld.
MEN IN BLACK: INTERNATIONAL – Official Trailer #2: https://youtu.be/F3lJwV7ZIIk
“Sunset” is a static exercise in cinema in motion, a dogmatic defense of consistency in point of view.
So even though every frame in László Nemes intimate period piece is a misty postcard to memory, even though there are incidents and encounters aplenty in its sprawling two hours and 20-odd minutes of screen time, it flirts with tedium itself.
The director of “Son of Saul” has attempted a Hungarian blend of Chekhov and “The Third Man” set in Budapest on the cusp of World War I. It’s gorgeous, but the tragedy of “Sunset” is that it washes over you without much of it soaking in.
It’s 1910 when Írisz Leiter (Juli Jakab) shows up at what used to be her family’s millinery shop in Budapest, looking for a job. But memories are long in the fin de siecle Austro-Hungarian Empire. Tragedy hit her family, costing them the business. And even though he is warned that tragedy could strike again, the owner, Mr. Brill (Vlad Ivanov) takes her in.
Írisz has trained as a milliner, learning to make hats in Trieste. She barely knew her family, and now she’s got lots of questions (in Hungarian, with English subtitles).
“The resemblance is unsettling,” Oszkár Brill mutters, and he’s not alone.
She has, or had, a brother — Kalman. Some awful things are associated with him. And despite whispered warnings, entreaties and threats, Íriszkeeps looking around, asking around, running into old family acquaintances and those who ran afoul of Kalman, including the mourning Countess Rédey (Julia Jakubowska).
And this hat-making business, with its bevy of back-biting beauties (Evelin Dobos, Judit Bárdos, Dorottya Moldován) who do the work? There’s more to that job than Írisz can figure out on her own.
“The horror of the world hides behind infinitely pretty things,” one vulpine Viennese Austrian (as opposed to Hungarian) purrs in her ear. Hats? Is he just talking about hats? We think not.
Nemes rigidly adopts the tactic of chasing/stalking Írisz through this Empire at an End, even if those living in it don’t know it. He sits on Írisz’s shoulder and follows her through the streets, into carriages or trams, into the seedy boarding house Mr. Brill “rescues” her from and into meetings, and meetings and men-only burlesques that deny her entry.
We see and hear — or often overhear — what she hears. She is in natural light, turning to the camera in shadowy closeups, as this or that piece of the puzzle is filled in, for her if not necessarily for us.
Nemes builds his soundtrack with a similar ear for intimacy. Even though Írisz is accosted, bullied, insulted, threatened, manhandled, chased and sexually assaulted, the (looped) voices all speak in a near-whisper — up close, low, as if no one else should be allowed to hear.
I didn’t mind the cryptic efforts to reveal the story, only in murky bits of visual or vocal information. It’s vexing and the story feels incomplete, with pieces missing long before the resolution that is nothing of the sort.
But Nemes hamstrings and hobbles his movie with his refusal to show us anything Írisz won’t have seen or heard, without us really knowing how much she knows before the story begins, without the camera ever leaving Ms. Jakab’s (a good actress and a Hungarian Emma Watson look-alike) side.
“Sunset” was never going to be a thriller, and the Chekhov comparison is mainly due to the Eastern European theatricality of it all. This unfolds like a memory play on wheels, rolling through the cafe society, simmering political tensions and brave new (automobiles, electricity) world heedless that this world is about to end. Suddenly.
And the mystery Írisz seeks to solve? It’s not interesting enough to make us miss the ferment she’s exploring in order to figure it out.
MPAA Rating: R for some violence
Cast: Juli Jakab, Evelin Dobos, Vlad Ivanov, Julia Jakubowska
Credits: Directed by László Nemes, script by Clara Royer, László Nemes and Matthieu Taponier. A Sony Pictures Classics release.
Running time: 2:22
Movie Nation 